THE TRIAL OF OJ SIMPSON AND THE RISE OF DONALD J TRUMP
I said an op ed could be written. Well, I wrote one and submitted it to a bunch of places, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to bite. So I might as well share it here.
***
I was as shocked as any white person by OJ Simpson’s acquittal in 1995, in large part because I was nowhere near as shocked as I should have been by the acquittals of the four police officers who’d bludgeoned a defenseless Rodney King on camera three years before. But looking back at Simpson’s arrest and trial today, what strikes me the most is how many of the features of our Trump-saturated media and politics they anticipated.
The media circus they created made Kardashian a household name, restored Geraldo Rivera’s celebrity, and either launched or supercharged the careers of a host of other infotainment stars, among them Nancy Grace, Star Jones, and Greta Van Susteren, as well as some Fox News personality-cum-political-activists, like the husband/wife former prosecutors Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova and the radio talker John Gibson.
I worked in book publishing at the time and covered all things OJ. Lawrence Schiller, the filmmaker and literary entrepreneur who’d packaged Gary Gilmore’s execution in the form of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Executioner’s Song (which indirectly created Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast—Abbott had been incarcerated with Gilmore; his book began as letters to Mailer about the psychological and moral effects of prison life), swooped in to co-write Simpson’s as-told-to I Want to Tell You and later the bestselling American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense. It struck me as a huge irony (and still does) that the person who seemingly made out the best after all the dust settled was the detective and would-be screenwriter Mark Fuhrman, who parlayed his notoriety into the career as a bestselling writer and television talking head that he’d dreamed of.
But most of all, it opened the door to the shouted 24/7 editorializing that passes for so much of news coverage on cable TV today, while laying the groundwork for the influencer culture that would arise on social media a few years later. The struggling actor Kato Kaelin more famous than he’d ever imagined as a result of the trial, though as he put it himself, in an LA Times op ed marking the murder’s 20th anniversary, “never has a man done so little to be recognized by so many.”
Donald Trump certainly recognized OJ Simpson’s power to drive ratings. A story on Mediate that was posted within minutes of his old friend’s death excerpts a 2008 interview with Howard Stern, in which Trump claimed he’d invited Simpson to appear as a contestant on The Apprentice, but had to rescind it when the NBC brass went “totally crazy.” “There’s a thing called ratings,” he explained. “If I put OJ on, huge ratings. Oh, forget it, 35 million people.”
But I think Trump also recognized the use he could make of that noisome media ecosystem and of the vast racial divide that the Simpson trial exposed to turn his own celebrity into political power. Writing in The New Republic all the way back in 1996, Jeffrey Rosen noted that “the Simpson case confirmed one of the central descriptive claims of critical race theory…that a jarring gap in perceptions between whites and blacks can no longer be denied.” While traditional politicians and pundits saw that epistemological divide as a national failure and looked for ways to repair it, Trump saw it as an opportunity—a gap that he could drive a political wedge into. There was racial animus on both sides, after all. Trump saw the depth and breadth of Black despair and alienation and recognized its counterpart among the white working class, which also felt betrayed and abandoned by the new economy, disdained by the political class, and threatened by immigrants and minorities. It was a force that he could and did weaponize.
Barack Obama as our first post-racial president? No, he was an affirmative action president, “a terrible student, terrible,” who not only hadn’t earned his Ivy League degrees but wasn’t even an American citizen. The police are trigger happy and engage in too much racial profiling? “Our local police…are afraid to do anything…because they don’t want to be accused of profiling,” Trump declared in 2016.
And now that he faces criminal and legal liability in multiple jurisdictions, he’s taken a page from OJ Simpson’s legal “dream team,” which, as a New York Times op ed put it at the time, “relied on a ‘shotgun approach’—shooting down every scrap of evidence against Mr. Simpson with a barrage of alternative explanations,” and worse still, encouraging a “spectacle of witnesses seeming to say one thing under oath and another outside the courtroom…of lawyers attacking witnesses’ credibility in press interviews, and of the play-by-play analysis supplied by legal scholars and practitioners” to undermine faith in the system.
Trumpism’s roots are deeper and more tangled than this of course. But it’s hard to look back at O.J. Simpson’s arrest and trial and not remember it as a foretaste of what would become our new reality.